Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (19 page)

When David Brinkley and his TV producer, Stuart Schulberg, call on the Clay brothers, they find them stretched out on their luxurious beds, bare-chested and barefooted, wearing expensive slacks. “Da-vid Brinkley!” Cassius cries out, in that natural comedy style that makes his emphatic pronunciation of names laugh-provoking without being insulting. “Da-vid Brinkley, you’re my man!” Cassius is on the phone to room service ordering breakfast. “Orange juice, a couple of jugs, a box of corn flakes. And milk. Can you send three quarts? And eggs— scramble up a nice batch for us, say about two dozen? Two or three rashers of bacon and a loaf of toast. What, service for six? No, ma’am, this is breakfast for two!” The recent conqueror of the British Empire and his brother Rudolph Valentino fill the room with their laughter. Then Cassius turns to Brinkley with those large eyes framed like a movie star’s between butterfly brows and high cheekbones. “Say, David, will you do me a favor, let’s do the ‘good nights’ together.” And the supercharged contender lapses into a more than passable imitation of Chet Huntley. “This is Cassius Marcellus Clay in Las Vegas. Good night, David.” And Brinkley responds in his patented sign-off. “And this is David Brinkley. Good night, Cassius.” Clay breaks up. He pounds his brother in joy. “Hey, David, that’s out of sight!”

Watching him roll his marvelous brown body and bark with laughter like a frolicking young sea lion, who would guess that this would be the same man who was soon to frighten, infuriate, and finally confront the white power structure of America? But looking back on the twenty-one-year-old Cassius with the hindsight gained from observing and visiting with the twenty-nine-year-old Ali, we now know that within the beamish boy who bantered with Brinkley lurked the racial anxiety, producing anger as causatively as boiling water releases steam. We follow joyously flamboyant Cassius Clay through his visit to Vegas for the Liston-Patterson “fight.” And since everything about the transformation of Cassius the Caterpillar into Muhammad the Butterfly is instructive, we wonder at the meaning of his existential acts. He invades the casino where Liston is playing blackjack, calls him an ugly bear, invites him to an impromptu match to settle the title here and now, laughs at the scowl that had frozen the blood of men who had thought themselves brave.

Onlookers were merely amused by the brash kid with the big mouth who seemed to have borrowed his publicity buildups from the wrestlers’ division of the classical school of acting. What was dangerous about Cassius was not immediately appreciated: the intensity, the concentration, the determination with which he played. It was this that separated the fools of Shakespeare from mere Middle Ages merrymakers. Wise kings listened to inspired fools while foolish kings laughed at the exterior apparatus of their jokes.

The best of fools was a set of delicate Chinese boxes, and just such a fool was Brother Malcolm’s “so-called American Negro,” a series of ingeniously fitted personalities, each larger one concealing and protecting a smaller one within until you finally come to the true resilient core. Many hundreds of years of slavery and now more than a century of hypocritical “freedom”—a democracy with the black man still locked into the steaming cities while the white man retreats from his day’s work to the flowering suburbs—this is the historical imbalance that conditions all but the most profoundly integrated (or whitened, Ali might say today) black man to take refuge in his Chinese boxes as a fox hides in the hedge from the hounds.

I may have more black friends than 95 percent of white Americans, and sometimes I feel I have succeeded in reaching the box within the box within the box—but I never leave the room without a feeling that the brothers left together will now continue to remove black Chinese box after Chinese box until at last they are left sitting around in their naked souls, like a
game of spiritual strip poker that reveals all to each, an exclusive deal played in a private club off limits even to sympathetic white players who would win the game.

What has all this to do with Cassius Clay in pursuit of Liston’s title and his subsequent odyssey? To our minds, a great deal. We are preparing ourselves not to be surprised when a young man, making of each boxing bout his parable, exchanges one image for another as dramatically but also as easily as an actor changes costumes between scenes.

And make no mistake about it, they were scenes in a drama that young Cassius knew he was playing, an allegory in the Brechtian manner that he was consciously authoring and acting out. On many different levels—the physical, the psychical, the religio-political. From his training camp for the first Liston fight Cassius waged an intense campaign of psychological warfare. The old bus Cassius had bought to move his entourage was painted red and white with “World’s Most Colorful Fighter” emblazoned across the top, and covered with signs broadcasting his low opinion of the champion: Bear Hunting Season. Liston Will Fall in Eight. Big Ugly Bear. … Cassius would invade Liston’s training camp, hose him with a torrent of insults and threats—poetically alone in America in thinking he could supplant the brooding, dangerous Sonny, who was expected to spank the obstreperous Cassius as a stern papa would whup a wayward son. The odds on Liston were 8 to 1. Of the press who were on the scene from every continent, we remember not one who gave the strident challenger a chance.

But Angelo Dundee, who somehow managed to remain uninvolved in the psychological high jinks and the gathering morality play, had warned us that Cassius had the style to outbox and defeat the ponderous, aging Liston. An odd group had believed in Cassius Clay. Our teenaged son David, who sent me twenty-five dollars he had saved from allowances to bet on youth vs. age; Drew “Bundini” Brown, an ancient mariner and saloon-keeper with a gift of gab, almost as seven-tongued as Cassius, who was called “assistant trainer” but was really the
guru-in-residence; and an unobtrusive black man who was quite possibly the most remarkable man, black or white, then living in America. This was the acknowledged spokesman for blackness in Harlem, the scourge of Uncle Toms and Negro civil rights leaders who spoke of integration and gradual improvements. This was the rising star of black militancy, the ex-hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, and pimp who finally, through the teaching of Elijah Muhammad, had come to understand his life of ghetto hustling as the painful preparation for his eventual role as liberator of his more than twenty million brothers suffering a living genocide in white America. Born Malcolm Little, he was known in the street as Big Red before he became even better known as Malcolm X.

In tracing two centuries of major prizefights, we can see how inextricably they are woven into our social fabric. From Molineaux to Louis, our champions were heroes of related acts that served as parables of cultural change. But
B.C.
, Before Clay, they had only dimly recognized their roles. Now it was
A.D.
, After Dallas, which Malcolm X had called “America’s chickens come home to roost.” There was a keen black hatred of all white institutions in Malcolm’s mind when he made the statement that Elijah used as the official reason for silencing him, pending his excommunication from the Black Church. The headline, seemingly a crass postmortem on the catastrophe in Dallas, had been taken from a context in which Malcolm had been discussing the atmosphere of racial hatred and social violence that the white man had created in America, a rabid intolerance that finally had struck down the Chief of State himself. This was too tragically true. A liberal white President had no business driving in an open car through a hate-filled Texas city where his enemies were articulate and armed. Camelot was in ruins, the boiling volcano in Harlem was getting ready to erupt again, and Malcolm X, in the moment of greatest travail in a life that sensitively reflected all the nightmare distortions of the American dream, was counseling the
challenger along lines either totally unfamiliar or anathema to the sports world.

Malcolm was not a fight fan; indeed he hardly knew who Cassius was when he met him and Rudolph at the Detroit mosque several years before. Cassius impressed him then simply as a likable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster with a contagious quality.

But in The Fight of 1964, Malcolm was convinced that Cassius had invited him to Miami to help the young fighter prove to the world the superiority of Islam over a white Christianity that had brainwashed the Negro community to accept inferior status and servitude. Molineaux had fought merely with his fists. Johnson had fought with his mocking smile and his wicked tongue. Cassius would fight with weapons never before carried into an American ring, his faith in a non-Western religion, as well as his growing awareness that, while he might be part of a minority 10 percent in the United States, he was also part of a global family of nonwhites among whom Caucasians were in turn a minority doomed to eventual defeat. While Cassius was rattling his bear trap and playing the loud-mouthed fool, while white Miami was either disgusted or entertained by this shrill showboating, a new philosophical and social confrontation was taking place that would prove as crucial to the middle sixties as was the Louis-Schmeling debate to the late thirties.

“This fight is the truth,” Malcolm told Cassius. “It’s the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring—for the first time. It’s a modern crusade—a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens.” The mystical reformed master hustler with the razor-blade mind was convinced that Allah had brought Cassius to this moment in order to prove something to black men with stunted egos who thought they needed white spiritual advisers.

Those who attended the wildest weigh-in in the history of the heavyweight division thought that Cassius was more in
need of psychiatric than spiritual assistance. Minutes before he burst into the ring at the Miami Beach auditorium we could hear the threatened promise of his arrival, like thunder before a storm. Then he and Bundini exploded into view, furiously pounding canes in angry rhythms on the floor and shouting their tribal slogan, “We’re coming to rumble. … Float like a butterfly—sting like a bee! Where’s the ugly bear? …” For an hour the demonstration went on, with Cassius screaming, lunging at Liston, shaking his fists, bulging his eyes. Cool and seasoned Jesse Abramson of the
New York Herald-Tribune,
trained to report without involving his emotions, was for the first time shaken at a weigh-in. “I think they should call it off,” he said to us. “He’s in no condition to fight tonight.” Most experts decided that Cassius was terrified and suffering from manic hysteria at the prospect of having to enter the ring with the dour-faced champion. Liston did his best to fix him with “the look,” a baleful stare he had perfected during many years in prison. But Cassius would not be transfixed like Floyd Patterson. Screaming like a banshee, pounding the stage with his feet as if possessed, he kept up this bizarre performance until his blood pressure had bubbled over the 200 mark and observers were convinced that the next stop was the psychiatric ward.

While reporters were asking the local boxing commissioners if they were considering calling off this unequal contest between a seasoned old champion and this hysterical boy, Cassius was back at his motel being examined by Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who found his blood pressure miraculously normal. “A case of self-induced hysteria,” diagnosed Pacheco. As Malcolm said, it was a case of mind over matter. There wasn’t a man in the world Sonny Liston was afraid of. But was this towering dark screamer a human being or a whirling dervish?

What we were seeing, along with all the other innovations Cassius was bringing to the climactic ritual of the heavyweight championship, were the new tactics of confrontation politics. Already a cult figure to the young, he was applying to the
traditional ceremony of the ring the outlandish behavior of an Abbie Hoffman, a “crazy,” against which the old-fashioned prison aggression of Sonny Liston could not aim its cold inner fire. Old-time boxing purists were disgusted, but there was Muslim method in his madness. In that hour of simulated rage he had cried, “You’re the chump and I’m the champ! It is prophesied for me to win! I cannot be beaten!”

In the fight that night, a macabre affair haunted by goblins and doubting Thomases, Cassius confounded his army of skeptics by making Sonny Liston suddenly look very slow and very tired. The old bull was winded after two rounds, punching ponderous gloves into the spaces that Cassius had occupied a moment before. At the end of seven rounds Liston hulked in his corner like a rejected Buddha, a worn-out god with a hole in his cheek toppled from his throne by a new religion—while the irrepressible standard-bearer of this new religion leaped around the ring proclaiming to the world he had just conquered symbolically for Islam, for Harlem, for Birmingham, for South Chicago, for a billion dark-skinned rooters around the globe, “I am the king! I am the king!”

Next morning at the press conference we discovered another of the Chinese boxes that make up the complex called Cassius Clay. Or so he had been called until that morning when he announced, in a voice with the volume now turned so low he was barely audible, that he was giving up his “slave name” and from now on would be known as Cassius X.

He chided the reporters for almost unanimously picking against him and informed them that he believed in the religion of Islam, that he believed Elijah Muhammad was its apostle, and that this was the religion believed in by more than 700 million people throughout Africa and Asia. Now reporters in the back of the room were calling “Louder,” whereas the day before they had feared that Cassius’s vocal gymnastics might burst their eardrums. When he stepped down from the platform we asked him about his immediate plans, and he told us he thought he would travel to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “They will all want to see the new champion of the world who believes the way they do,” he said so quietly you had to lean toward him to hear it all. “And I will talk with the leaders and the wise men of those countries.”

Of the past eight heavyweight champions, six had been Negro, but this was the first black champion to proclaim his blackness, to say to the white world, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” the ideal practitioner to tap out on the heads and bodies of his opponents the message: Black Is Beautiful.